[Mirioron]

Do you brush your teeth? Have you ever looked into why brushing your teeth is good scientifically? How many people do you think have done that? Yet we all brush our teeth or at least believe it's good for us. We're not basing our decision to brush teeth on science. We're basing it on the word of other people.

Other people can also say the craziest things and pass it off as science. Should we believe them too, because they claim it's science? You can't verify every single thing whether it's "based on science" or not. You need to use heuristics and sometimes those heuristics lead people to do something different that ends up being the better way to do things than what science at the time entails. Taking away people's choice means that this happens a lot less.

As an aside, I would like to contest the idea that science is the only way we know things. Most science that ends up in practical use has a lot of handwaving of details in it. We describe some parts of it, but everything else is filled in by our instincts and knowledge. Few sciences are as pure as mathematics, where you can reason over things on paper without needing an extra assumed context. In most cases when science says we "know" something it is meant in a narrow context. We extrapolate based on that into other contexts and most of the time it works fine, but we often don't know.

[scotty79]

I don't brush my teeth because other people word.

I'm doing it for the feeling of freshness and believe it's good for me because of what I believe to know from science and personal expeirience about existence and influence of microorganisms.

I try to avoid putting qtips in my ears even though people are doing it because science says that it has higher probability of doing harm than good.

> Other people can also say the craziest things and pass it off as science.

That doesn't make it science and you should base your decisions on science not things passed as science. You should use your critical faculties and knowledge of scientific process to tell what science is and what is not.

You definitely should verify every single thing that informs your decision proces if the decision you are about to make is an important one.

> ... Sometimes those heuristics lead people to do something different that ends up being the better way to do things than what science at the time entails.

Science offers heuristics to guide your decision process. If scientific heuristic exists and you are using your own instead, you are doing wrong (even if by chance it ends up well).

If there's no scientific heuristic for given problem ( you need to check! ) then by all means make up your own. You won't be wrong unless you make "let's ignore what science established" a part of your heuristic.

You'd be amazed how much of the things you consider instincts filling gaps in science was actually researched for very practical fields. A lot. When money is on the line people suddenly get very interested in actual reality and they do the research. Some of those instincts get confirmed, some get thoroughly debunked. There was no knowledge untill science properly investigated it. Just self propagating ideas, right or wrong.